News
Local

'Moral panic' over theatres unjustified

Criminology expert Dr. Vincent Sacco said the reaction to the Colorado movie theatre shootings and the reaction to recent violence in Toronto – including the street party shooting that killed two and injured 23 – are broadly similar.
Whig-Standard

Recent shootings in Colorado and Toronto have people across North America questioning their safety, but the panic is unwarranted, a Queen’s University professor said.

Criminology expert Dr. Vincent Sacco said the reaction to the Colorado movie theatre shootings and the reaction to recent violence in Toronto – including the street party shooting that killed two and injured 23 – are broadly similar.

“I think there tends to be quite understandably in the initial period a very disproportionate reaction,” he said. “That translates into a tendency to pretty dramatically overestimate the probability of these kinds of things happening.”

The mass media coverage has led to interpretations of Toronto as “unbearably dangerous,” Sacco said, but he thinks it’s still a pretty safe city.

After 12 people were killed and dozens more injured at the Aurora, Colo. screening of the Dark Knight Rises on July 20, media outlets reported that movie theatre security around the United States increased, including police officers posted at theatres in New York and bag searching in Washington.

The “moral panic” over theatres is particularly unjustified, Sacco said. Last year, for example, there were 1.3 billion movie tickets sold in Canada and the U.S., while the number of deaths in theatres is miniscule.

“The sheer horrendous character of it all and the bizarre aspects of this case as well really led to a high degree of focused media attention on it,” he said.

The nation’s second-largest theatre chain, AMC, vowed to prohibit people wearing costumes from entering its more than 300 theatres amid claims that the Aurora gunman’s gas mask and armour allowed him to blend into the crowd of costume-clad moviegoers.

Measures like these are an unjustified response, Sacco said, as the Aurora suspect left the theatre through a back door to retrieve his gear and returned through that same back door with his combat gear before commencing his shooting.

“So he would not have been caught by a metal detector or a costume detector if they had had one,” he said, adding that these measures “indicate how quickly we want to find a simple solution to a complex problem.

“The problem is we’re always fighting the last war. After 9/11 we focused on airplanes, after Columbine we focused on schools, and now we’ll focus on movie theatres.”

The 1999 Columbine school shooting in Littleton, Colo. – less than 20 miles from Aurora – inspired a focus on school security, Sacco said, which was also seen in Canada, “not to the same degree, but there’s certainly been a lot of attention directed at the issue of school crime in Canada and it all dates from (Columbine).”

Sacco said schools, like movie theatres, are “soft targets,” meaning a dense gathering of undefended targets, but that people are no more likely to be killed at a movie theatre now than they are at other soft target locations like church or a hotel lobby.

Movie theatres are no more dangerous this week than they were last week, he added.

“To get what happened to happen again you would need the confluence of three things: you need the people in a large group, you need all that weaponry and somebody with a pretty rare psychological configuration,” he said.

Sacco said he thinks failure to control access to assault weapons is an important part of the issue. Gun access is still a divisive issue in the U.S. to a greater degree than in Canada, Sacco said.

In the United States, for instance, there are 80 guns for every 100 people, he said. This doesn’t mean that 80% of people own guns, as many people – such as the Colorado shooter – own multiple weapons.

“I think there’s a very strong feeling (in Canada) about people having a right to guns for hunting or legitimate purposes. I don’t think you see the same kind of feeling about rights to assault weapons,” he said. “There’s not as established of a gun culture.”